Back in the days when his peerless prose used to light up the Observer, Clive James used to say that whenever Jane Fonda came out and said something with which he agreed, it made him stop and think in order to re-evaluate his position.

Most people feel the same way about Sepp Blatter. It is easy to laugh at the Fifa president, who often seems deliberately to cultivate an air of the eccentric, and even easier to assume he and his organisation are always in the wrong, pontificating as they do from their Swiss mountain top about what goes on in the distant valley below.

Just occasionally, though, Fifa gets something right, or at least does something for the right reasons. It appeared to invite even more scorn and ridicule on itself at the weekend by setting its face against goalline technology at almost exactly the moment a legitimate goal was missed in an FA Cup quarter-final – if you were listening to the Pompey-Birmingham game on Radio 5 Live, as I was, the two news items were presented almost simultaneously – yet at risk of being branded a Luddite and swimming against a tide of popular opinion on the subject, I would like to back Fifa's stance on this issue. There is no need for goalline technology in football.

I realise that is almost a heretical position, so here are my reasons. First of all, disputed goals are not all that common in football. You can go weeks, if not months, without seeing one. Many a time it is possible to watch an entire weekend's worth of Premier League games on Match of the Day and never encounter an argument about whether the ball crossed the line or hit the back of the net and came out again. These problems are rare. This is not the case in tennis, where you get a line decision at least once a minute, and technology more or less had to be brought in to deal with serves and calls that were happening too fast for the human eye.

In cricket also, given that every delivery could lead to an lbw shout and every scampering run could end with a run-out appeal, there is a need to be vigilant all the time and cameras are a definite help, even if umpires still judge lbws by eye. Every time a try is scored in rugby there are issues that can be usefully checked on replay – grounding, foot in touch, double-movement etc – and thanks to technology you even see tries awarded nowadays that would never have been given in the past, because a fingertip's worth of downward pressure was applied too quickly for the referee to see or there were bodies in the way.

That is a positive application of technology, yet there is hardly any need for it in football because the vast majority of goals are plain for all to see. The net billows, the goalkeeper clutches at thin air, John Terry kicks a post in frustration, the referee points to the centre circle. We all recognise the signs, we don't need electronic assistance. It is true that there are a small number of situations, the phantom Birmingham goal on Saturday being a case in point, where a chip in the ball or a goalline camera would help the referee. Yet goalline cameras are not infallible, quite often there are bodies in the way of those, too, and in many cases the referee is still going to have to halt the game to check the footage, a far from ideal solution.

At first glance the chip in the ball seems a neater idea, rigged up with sensors in the goal frame so that a buzzer could sound every time the whole of the sphere crossed the line. While an electrical signal is just what the referee Steve Bennett could have done with at Fratton Park, it is important to bear in mind that with such a system there would be a buzzer/bleep/electrical signal for every goal, even perfectly obvious, non-disputed ones. How long do you think it would be, in those circumstances, before a club linked the buzzer to the sound system, the floodlights, or the giant screen? You could have anything from a snatch of song to a laser display to a volley of fireworks at the instant a goal is scored, and that would be amusing for about an hour and a half and then awful for the rest of time.

Even more awful might be what Sky could get up to with the same electronic signal. Stand by for every goal being greeted with a line of dancing girls or an erupting volcano. Think of the sponsorship possibilities. No sooner has the ball crossed the line than it's ANOTHER GOAL BROUGHT TO YOU BY FIZZY DRINKS AND GREASY BURGERS! Maybe I exaggerate, but I'm still grateful Fifa has closed the door on any such unnecessary adulteration, whatever Arsène Wenger says about being illogical. You never know where these developments are going to end up.

One could argue that as there are so few (relatively) disputed goals in football they are better left alone, or even welcomed as talking points. Think of all the mileage people have had over the years out of Geoff Hurst's goal in 1966, for example. I am not going to argue that, however, for the very good reason that while disputed goals in football may be small in number they are often high in significance. I doubt if the Irish are prepared to accept Thierry Henry's handball as a refereeing oversight and a good talking point, and I imagine Fiorentina bitterly resented going out of the Champions League to Bayern Munich last night because of an offside goal in the first leg that Ruud Gullit quite rightly called scandalous.

The thing about both those goals, two of the most obvious miscarriages of justice this season, is that neither would have been exposed by goalline technology. What would have been of enormous assistance, on the other hand, is the technology already available. All that needed to happen for Henry's crime to be spotted and for Miroslav Klose to be confirmed as yards offside, was for the fourth official, or perhaps the match referee himself, to have a peek at the monitor. It is incredible that Fifa will not sanction such a simple recourse, perhaps to be rationed to just a couple of appeals per game, when even Blatter admitted that the world getting to see what Henry did while the referee had to act blind made the game look stupid.

At the moment, there is nothing to prevent a similar injustice spoiling a World Cup match in summer. Let us suppose there is another Geoff Hurst scenario in the final. One team is screaming at the referee that the ball crossed the line, the other is swearing it did not. The world watching on television has already seen a couple of replays that clearly establish the truth, but the referee did not have a perfect view and neither did his linesman, so while the two can confer they still have to guess based on what they saw once, in real time.

Football was lucky, in a way, in 1966, because the TV technology was not that great and the pictures were unable to prove or disprove the referee's decision. That is no longer the case, yet in the Henry incident the pictures were ignored and guesswork prevailed. The world saw what happened, the referee did not. Going into the 11th World Cup since Hurst's shot hit the underside of the bar and was generously awarded by an Azerbaijani linesman, officials will not miss goalline technology. It is the lack of living-room technology, the inability to see the pictures the world is watching from armchairs, sofas and bar stools, that is making their job impossibly difficult.